RadeonTop

RadeonTop [4] is a terminal program that is suitable for plain vanilla pure monitoring of AMD graphics cards. It supports many old and new AMD Radeon chips. The software can be found in the repositories of most distributions, which means that you can normally conveniently install RadeonTop using the built-in package manager. The project's GitHub page also describes the manual installation procedure for the software.

If there are several graphics cards in the system, RadeonTop can address a specific one, but not several simultaneously. The -b parameter, followed by the number of the appropriate PCI bus in hex, selects the desired card. If you want to monitor two or more cards at the same time, you will need to call up the program in separate terminal windows.

The tool visualizes various technical details about the graphics cards in your system in the form of a bar chart. The terminal window is divided into two columns: On the left, the technical parameters are shown along with the load, which is given as a percentage, while bar graphs on the right show the matching values (Figure 3). The VRAM and Shader Clock values are important indicators of how busy a graphics chip is. However, they only describe the utilization; RadeonTop does not show the fan speed or temperature of the graphics processor.

Figure 3: RadeonTop provides an overview of the current load on AMD graphics chips.

Conclusions

Besides legacy system monitoring, RadeonTop also gives you a snapshot of the AMD graphics chip's utilization. Among other things, it shows how well hardware-accelerated graphics output from video players and browsers is working. The CoreCtrl tool offers gamers and users who aren't worried about experimenting a number of overclocking options for AMD chips. Be warned, though, overclocking is at your own risk. Although automatic throttling largely rules out damage to the hardware at excessive temperatures above 85 degrees, the system can become unstable. It makes a great deal of sense to carry out a few tests with the graphics hardware running at full load.